tips on switching PLA roll to ABS?

[metrons]

had my printer about a week now. i about to remove the PLA that came with the printer and switchin in the ABS. do i have to do anything special when switching materials? let the extruder thing extrude some material or something? totally new to this and i'm trying to not learn the wrong way.

really appreciate if anyone can walk me through what i should be doing.

cheers!

[jimc]

no just heat it up to 245 for the abs, feed it in and your good to go.

[Dale Reed]

metrons,

If you still have the PLA in the machine, I'd suggest heating the hot end up to PLA temperature, then using the jog controls back it out of the hot end (say, extrude negative 80 mm), then stop and let the machine cool. Now pull the PLA out the top of the extruder -- you'll get a nice thin bit of filament, and possibly a lump at the end. I think this will get as much out as possible without disassembling, etc. Unthread from the tubing and pull the PLA reel from the machine.

Now heat the hot end up to ABS temperature, thread the machine with the ABS filament, and jog a couple hundred millimeters through to flush it out. Should be good to go. (If it's a different color, you'll need to jog through until the color coming out is purely the ABS color.)

Dale

[metrons]

thanks guys, so simple and it worked perfectly. cheers!

[Tim]

Speaking of switching materials and cleaning extruders, has anybody tried the eSUN "Cleaning Filament"? http://intservo.com/products/new-clearn ... =801941131; that page also has a link to this writeup: http://3dprint.com/6042/esun-cleaning-filament/. The writeup notes that the eSUN stuff does basically what nylon does, and they speculate that it may just be nylon or some nylon variant.

[Capt. John]

If your hotend is fairly new, probably no big deal, over time I found out the hard way
this is where my issues with clogged tips started.

I have dedicated hotends/extruder drives for PET+ and ABS and rolls of PLA that don't get used.

May I suggest, you back out all the PLA you can, before feeding in the ABS.
Then, keep temp at 240 and extrude 200mm of ABS before kicking the print temp up to 245 for ABS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but PLA residue can be cooked at 245 inside the barrel.

I learned higher infill percentages in ABS caused major corner curl on parts like extruder drives.

[jimc]

Tim, just going off what i have heard.....apparently there is a cleaning plastic for big industrial extruders. This is used between batches to clean out the machine between colors and materials. The filament is the same stuff on a smaller scale. I do remember hearing the name of the specific material a long time ago but i forget what it is. I dont think its plain old nylon. It may be some form of it or it might not be at all. Im not sure.